By John ByrneTuesday, February 2nd, 2010 -- 10:30 amShare on Facebook Stumble This!

"Here is an idea for Barack Obama to salvage his tottering administration by taking a step that protects the United States and its allies," begins neoconservative scholar Daniel Pipes. "He needs a dramatic gesture to change the public perception of him as a light-weight, bumbling ideologue, preferably in an arena where the stakes are high, where he can take charge, and where he can trump expectations."

Any guesses?

"Such an opportunity does exist," Pipes writes. "Obama can give orders for the U.S. military to destroy Iran’s nuclear-weapon capacity."

Pipes is a longtime pro-war hawk who has been particularly vociferous in his calls for a "special scrutiny" of Arab Americans. The liberal blog ThinkProgress notes that Pipes ran a campaign against a New York City public school focused on teaching Arab culture, successfully forcing the school's principal to resign.

Pipes references 9/11's catalyzing impact on voter enthusiasm for former President George W. Bush, and says Obama could get the same boost by starting a new conflict with the Persian state.

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"Just as 9/11 caused voters to forget George W. Bush’s meandering early months, a strike on Iranian facilities would dispatch Obama’s feckless first year down the memory hole and transform the domestic political scene," he writes.

"It would sideline health care,' he continues, "prompt Republicans to work with Democrats, make netroots squeal, independents reconsider, and conservatives swoon."

In response to a growing belief that Iran is developing a nuclear weapons program, the US has stepped up its defense in the Gulf. President Obama recently sent ships and missiles to the Gulf region, a move Iran derided as a "puppet show."

New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh revealed in 2007 that the Bush administration had a highly developed plan that would involve "surgical [air]strikes" on suspected Iranian nuclear facilities. He wrote that the US was "beefing up intelligence resources within the CIA and shifting its rhetorical campaign in a bid to win support from the American people should the strikes proceed."

The drive toward an Iranian strike was so strong, Hersh later suggested, that Bush and Cheney were willing to go against their own party.

"Cheney and Bush don't give a rats ass about the future of the Republican Party when it comes to this," Hersh told MSNBC.

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I'M A DEPLORABLE KNUCKLEHEAD THAT SUPPORTS PRESIDENT TRUMP. MAY GOD BLESS HIM AND KEEP HIM SAFE.

Totally obsessed with Islamic extremists well before September 11, Daniel Pipes has made it his life's work to convince the western world that there can be no bargaining with Arab fanatics -- they must simply be rooted out and destroyed. He was a major proponent of the Iraq invasion, claiming that it would have very positive consequences for "militant Islam, the energy market, the Israeli conflict, the general problem of the Arab states modernizing, you name it."

A prolific author and expert in medieval Islam, Dr. Pipes earned his PhD at Harvard, where his father taught Soviet history. Richard Pipes served as Ronald Reagan's chief advisor on the Soviet Union (and his son spent a year working in Reagan's State Department). Daniel taught at Harvard like his father, then at the University of Chicago, and later the Naval War College.

He also headed the Foreign Policy Research Institute, then founded the think tank Middle East Forum in 1994, which publishes Middle East Quarterly. His strident pro-Israeli views toward the Palestinian conflict have polarized his audience. According to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Pipes "has exhibited a troubling bigotry toward Muslims and Islam" and possesses a "history of hostility toward Muslims in general and to the American Muslim community in particular." In response, Pipes told Salon: "David Duke looks nice, presents himself well, but as soon as he opens his mouth, you see he's a wild-eyed maniac. Well, so are these people."

In the March 2002 issue of Insight magazine, Pipes predicted that violence would soon cease in Israel: "Probably [during] this calendar year the Palestinians will realize they are getting nowhere and just stop." Maybe it was this sense of optimism that led President Bush in 2003 to nominate Pipes to the United States Institute of Peace.

Good God...why don't we just declare war on the entire world and be done with it?

Yeah, and perhaps give him another Peace Prize?

WAR IS PEACE

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And dying in your beds, many years from now, would you be willin' to trade ALL the days, from this day to that, for one chance, just one chance, to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they'll never take... OUR FREEDOM!